31 Aug, 2011
Rage is still pretty and one of the finest looking games out there right now. It could have been a lot prettier though, if the right decisions had been made. John Carmack, co-found of id Software, intentionally sacrificed certain graphical powers in exchange for a better framerate. That decision didn’t come without a battle.
In an interview with Gamasutra, Carmack said that it was a “hard-fought battle,” one that had the user specifically in mind. “I made the conscious decision that the user is going to get more value out of running at a higher framerate than me making the pixels pretty,” he said. “I think I could have made the game look better at 30 hertz. We could have had some more design freedom.” But Carmack also said that keeping the game at 60 frames per second would look better to everybody, including those of us who can’t even tell the difference. It’s all subliminal though, said Carmack.
According to a little experiment Carmack conducted, most players couldn’t tell the difference between a doubling of framerate between 60FPS and 120FPS. 30FPS would have been just too slow in some cases. “Interestingly, almost nobody can tell the difference between 120 and 60,” said Carmack. Seems like 60FPS is the Goldilocks, then. Not too slow, not too fast, but just right.
There’s a limit to just how pretty or how fast a game can run, and Carmack knows all his limits. “…in many ways, we are approaching sort of the biological limits of what betterness we can display,” said Carmack.
Better framerate, or better graphics? id Software votes for the better framerate for a smoother running game. While prettier graphics make for great eye candy, choppy animation and movement just doesn’t cut it anymore.
What would you rather have: better graphics, or a better framerate?
Via Gamasutra.
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